I don’t care much about affirmative action.

About its goals of overcoming racial exclusion and fostering diversity, yes. But I have no major emotional investment in this particular means toward those particular ends.

So when some people began touting another way of achieving those objectives, I listened with interest. Their argument goes that we can boost minority college enrollment by guaranteeing admission to the top 10 percent of seniors at each high school. But it turns out there’s this one minor flaw.

It doesn’t work.

At least, that’s the conclusion drawn by researchers at Harvard University who’ve been studying so-called “percent programs” in the three states — Florida, Texas and California — that use them. Their findings, released last week, indicate that such programs do little if anything to increase black and Hispanic enrollment.

Back to the drawing board, I suppose. I have to confess, though, that I have little faith in this whole idea of finding a nonracial way of achieving racial objectives. Yet this, according to President Bush and others, is the only acceptable way of doing it.

There is something tortured in that logic. It echoes the thinking that periodically produces proposals to replace affirmative action with programs that give preferential treatment to poor kids of whatever race.

As if poverty were the issue here. As if some mysterious predisposition toward destitution were the root of what ails African America.

Such thinking speaks eloquently about our eagerness to circumvent, and unwillingness to deal with, that which is right in front of us. Meaning race and racial inequity.

The Harvard studies are released against a backdrop of increasing uncertainty about the future of affirmative action. The Supreme Court is weighing a challenge to admissions policies at the University of Michigan that award extra points to minority applicants. The school is being sued by white would-be students who say those policies put them at an unfair disadvantage.

Here’s what’s interesting, though. Race is not the only thing for which the university gives preferential treatment. To the contrary, if you’re from a rural area, if you’re poor, if you have athletic ability, if dad is an alum, you’ve got a leg up at the University of Michigan.

So where are the lawsuits challenging the unfairness, the “reverse discrimination” of these practices? If opponents of affirmative action truly proceed from a conviction that it’s wrong to reward or penalize because of some accident of birth, where is the flurry of lawsuits by those who didn’t get into school because they lived in the wrong region or were not athletic? Why is it only when race is the dividing line that some people feel so cheated and mistreated that they have to take it to the judge?

You know the answer as well as I do. No resentments are quite as powerful as those raised by race. Particularly among those American whites who have spent the last 30 years feeling put upon by blacks, those who have convinced themselves, against all evidence to the contrary, that they are an oppressed minority tyrannized by a powerful civil rights establishment. They see the idea of blacks “getting” or, God forbid, “being given.”

My own ambivalence toward affirmative action is based elsewhere. Namely, in a fear that it concretizes in African-American people a victim mentality, a belief that we require extra help because of some inherent defect in us. As opposed to a defect in the original U.S. Constitution.

So I’m always interested in anything that purports to achieve affirmative action’s goals without affirmative action’s methods. But it’s a fallacy to act as if those goals can be approached or even addressed without taking race into account.

No problem was ever solved by those who pretended it did not exist.

Correction: In a recent column on Internet suicide, I misspelled the name of Brandon Vedas. I regret the error.

— Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for the Miami Herald.